The Inheritance of Loss (4 page)

She had first met the cook when she had been delivered from St. Augustine’s in Dehra Dun. Nine years ago now. The taxi had dropped her off and the moon had shone fluorescently enough to read the name of the house—Cho Oyu—as she had waited, a little stick figure at the gate, her smallness emphasizing the vastness of the landscape. A tin trunk was at her side. "Miss S. Mistry, St.

Augustine’s Convent." But the gate was locked. The driver rattled and shouted.

"
Oi, koi hai? Khansama? Uth. Koi hai? Uth. Khansama?
"

Kanchenjunga glowed macabre, trees stretched away on either side, trunks pale, leaves black, and beyond, between the pillars of the trees, a path led to the house.

It seemed a long while before they heard a whistle blowing and saw a lantern approaching, and there had come the cook, bandy-legged up the path, looking as leather-visaged, as weathered and soiled, as he did now, and as he would ten years later. A poverty stricken man growing into an ancient at fast-forward.

Compressed childhood, lingering old age. A generation between him and the judge, but you wouldn’t know it to look at them. There was age in his temperament, his kettle, his clothes, his kitchen, his voice, his face, in the undisturbed dirt, the undisturbed settled smell of a lifetime of cooking, smoke, and kerosene.

________

How dare they behave this way to you," said Sai, trying to overcome the gap between them as they stood together surveying the mess the police had left in his hut.

"But what kind of investigation would it be, then?" the cook reasoned.

In their attempt to console his dignity in two different ways, they had merely highlighted its ruin.

They bent to collect his belongings, the cook careful to place the pages of the letters in the correct envelopes. One day he’d return them to Biju so his son would have a record of his journey and feel a sense of pride and achievement.

Five

Biju at the Baby Bistro.

Above, the restaurant was French, but below in the kitchen it was Mexican and Indian. And, when a Paki was hired, it was Mexican, Indian, Pakistani.

________

Biju at Le Colonial for the authentic colonial experience.

On top, rich colonial, and down below, poor native. Colombian, Tunisian, Ecuadorian, Gambian.

________

On to the Stars and Stripes Diner. All American flag on top, all Guatemalan flag below.

Plus one Indian flag when Biju arrived.

________

"Where is Guatemala?" he had to ask. "Where is Guam?"

"Where is Madagascar?"

"Where is Guyana?"

"Don’t you know?" the Guyanese man said. "Indians everywhere in Guyana, man."

"Indians in Guam. Everywhere you look, practically, Indians."

"Trinidad?"

"Trinidad full of Indians!! Saying—can you believe it?—‘Open a caan of saalmon, maaan.’"

Madagascar—Indians Indians.

Chile—in the Zona Rosa duty-free of Tierra del Fuego, Indians, whiskey, electronics. Bitterness at the thought of Pakistanis up in the Areca used-car business. "Ah . . . forget it. . . let those
bhenchoots
make their quarter percent. . .

."

Kenya. South Africa. Saudi Arabia. Fiji. New Zealand. Surinam.

In Canada, a group of Sikhs came long ago; they went to remote areas and the women took off their
salwars
and wore their kurtas like dresses.

Indians, yes, in Alaska; a
desi
owned the last general store in the last town before the North Pole, canned foods mostly, fishing tackle, bags of salt, and shovels; his wife stayed back in Karnal with the children, where they could, on account of the husband’s sacrifice, afford Little Angels Kindergarten.

On the Black Sea, yes, Indians, running a spice business.

Hong Kong. Singapore.

How had he learned nothing growing up? England he knew, and America, Dubai, Kuwait, but not much else.

________

There was a whole world in the basement kitchens of New York, but Biju was ill-equipped for it and almost relieved when the Pakistani arrived. At least he knew what to do. He wrote and told his father.

The cook was alarmed. What kind of place was he working in? He knew it was a country where people from everywhere journeyed to work, but oh, surely not Pakistanis! Surely they would not be hired. Surely Indians were better liked—

"Beware," the cook wrote to his son. "Beware. Beware. Keep away.

Distrust."

His son had already done him proud. He found he could not talk straight to the man; every molecule of him felt fake, every hair on him went on alert.

Desis
against Pakis.

Ah, old war, best war—

Where else did the words flow with an ease that came from centuries of practice? How else would the spirit of your father, your grandfather, rise from the dead?

Here in America, where every nationality confirmed its stereo-type—

Biju felt he was entering a warm amniotic bath.

But then it grew cold. This war was not, after all, satisfying; it could never go deep enough, the crick was never cracked, the itch was never scratched; the irritation built on itself, and the combatants itched all the more.

"Pigs pigs, sons of pigs,
sooar ka baccha,
"
Biju shouted.

"
Uloo ka patha,
son of an owl, low-down son-of-a-bitch Indian."

They drew the lines at crucial junctures. They threw cannonball cabbages at each other.

________

"***!!!!" said the Frenchman.

It sounded to their ears like an angry dandelion puff, but what he said was that they were a troublesome pair. The sound of their fight had traveled up the flight of steps and struck a clunky note, and they might upset the balance, perfectly first-world on top, perfectly third-world twenty-two steps below. Mix it up in a heap and then who would patronize his restaurant,
hm?
With its
coquilles
Saint-Jacques à la vapeur
for $27.50 and the
blanquette de veau
for $23, and a duck that made an overture to the colonies, sitting like a pasha on a cushion of its own fat, exuding the scent of saffron.

What were they thinking? Do restaurants in Paris have cellars full of Mexicans,
desis,
and Pakis?

No, they do not. What are you thinking?

They have cellars full of Algerians, Senegalese, Moroccans. . . .

Good-bye, Baby Bistro. "Use the time off to take a bath," said the owner. He had been kind enough to hire Biju although he found him smelly.

Paki one way, Biju the other way. Rounding the corner, meeting each other again, turning away again.

Six

So, as Sai waited at the gate,
the cook had come bandy-legged up the path with a lantern in his hand, blowing on a whistle to warn away jackals, the two cobras, and the local thief, Gobbo, who robbed all the residents of Kalimpong in rotation and had a brother in the police to protect him.

"Have you come from England?" the cook asked Sai, unlocking the gate with its fat lock and chain, although anyone could easily climb over the bank or come up the ravine.

She shook her head.

"America? No problem there with water or electricity," he said. Awe swelled his words, made them tick smug and fat as first-world money.

"No," she said.

"No? No? His disappointment was severe. "From Foreign." No question mark. Reiterating basic unquestionable fact. Nodding his head as if she’d said it, not he.

"No. From Dehra Dun."

"Dehra Dun!" Devastated, "
Kamaalhai,
"said the cook. "Here we have made so much fuss, thought you’re coming from far away, and you’ve been in Dehra Dun all along. Why didn’t you come before?

"Well," said the cook when she did not answer, "Where are your parents?"

"They’re dead," she said.

"Dead." He dropped the lantern and the flame went out. "
Baap re!
I’m never told anything. What will happen to you, poor child?" he said with pity and hopelessness. "Where did they die?" With the lantern flame out, the scene became suffused with mysterious moonlight.

"Russia."

"Russia! But there aren’t any jobs there." Words again became deflated currency, third-world, bad-luck money. "What were they doing?"

"My father was a space pilot."

"Space pilot, never heard of such a thing. . . ." He looked at her suspiciously.

There was something wrong with this girl, he could tell, but here she was. "Just have to stay now," he mulled. "Nothing else for you . . . so sad . . . too bad. . . ."

Children often made up stories or were told them so as to mask a terrible truth.

The cook and the driver struggled with the trunk as the driveway was too overgrown with weeds to accommodate a car; just a slim path had been stamped through.

The cook turned back: "How did they die?"

Somewhere above, there was the sound of an alarmed bird, of immense wings starting up like a propeller.

________

It had been a peaceful afternoon in Moscow, and Mr. and Mrs. Mistry were crossing the square to the Society for Interplanetary Travel. Here, Sai’s father had been resident ever since he’d been picked from the Indian Air Force as a possible candidate for the Intercosmos Program. These were the last days of Indo-USSR

romance and already there was a whiff of dried bouquet in the air, in the exchanges between the scientists that segued easily into tears and nostalgia for the red-rose years of courtship between the nations.

Mr. and Mrs. Mistry had grown up during those heady times when the affection had been cemented by weapons sales, sporting competitions, visiting dance troups, and illustrated books that introduced a generation of Indian schoolchildren to Baba Yaga, who lived in her house on chicken feet in the prehistoric dark of a Russian forest; to the troubles of Prince Ivan and Princess Ivanka before they resided happily ever after in an onion-domed palace.

The couple had met in a public park in Delhi. Mrs. Mistry, then a college student, would go from the ladies’ dorm to study and to dry her hair in the shade and quiet of a neem tree where the matron had authorized her girls to go. Mr.

Mistry had come jogging by, already in the air force, strong and tall, with a trim mustache, and the jogger found this student so astonishingly pretty, with an expression half tart, half sweet, that he stopped to stare. They became acquainted in this grassy acre, cows tethered to enormous rusty lawn mowers slowly grinding back and forth before a crumbling Mughal tomb. Before a year was up, in the deep cool center of the tomb, golden indirect light passing from alcove to hushed alcove, duskier, muskier through the carved panels each casting the light in a different lace pattern—flowers, stars—upon the floor, Mr. Mistry proposed.

She thought quickly. This romance had allowed her to escape the sadness of her past and the tediousness of her current girlish life. There is a time when everyone wishes to be an adult, and she said yes. The pilot and the student, the Zoroastrian and the Hindu, emerged from the tomb of the Mughal prince knowing that nobody other than themselves would be impressed by their great secular romance. Still, they considered themselves lucky to have found each other, each one empty with the same loneliness, each one fascinating as a foreigner to the other, but both educated with an eye to the West, and so they could sing along quite tunefully while strumming a guitar. They felt free and brave, part of a modern nation in a modern world.

________

As early as 1955, Khrushchev had visited Kashmir and declared it forever part of India, and more recently, the Bolshoi had performed
Swan Lake
before a Delhi audience dressed for the occasion in their finest silk saris and largest jewels.

And, of course, these were the early days of space exploration. A dog named Lalka had been whooshed up in
Sputnik II.
In 1961, a chimp named Ham had made the journey. After him, in the same year, Yuri Gagarin. As the years lumbered on, not only Americans and Soviets, dogs and chimps, but a Vietnamese, a Mongolian, a Cuban, a woman, and a black man went up.

Satellites and shuttles were orbiting the earth and the moon; they had landed on Mars, been launched toward Venus, and had completed a flyby of Saturn. At this time, a visiting Soviet team of aeronautical and aviation experts who had been instructed by their government to find likely candidates to send to space had arrived in India.

Visiting an air force facility in the nation’s capital, their attention had been caught by Mr. Mistry, not merely because of his competence but also because of the steely determination that shone from his eyes.

He had joined a few other candidates in Moscow, and six-year-old Sai had been hastily entrusted to the same convent her mother had attended.

The competition was fierce. Just as Mr. Mistry was confessing to his wife his certainty that he would be chosen over his colleagues to become the very first Indian beyond the control of gravity, the fates decided otherwise, and instead of blasting through the stratosphere, in this life, in this skin, to see the world as the gods might, he was delivered to another vision of the beyond when he and his wife were crushed by local bus wheels, weighted by thirty indomitable ladies from the provinces who had speeded two days to barter and sell their wares in the market.

Thus they had died under the wheels of foreigners, amid crates of babushka nesting dolls. If their last thoughts were of their daughter in St. Augustine’s, she would never know.